The smartest person in the world could be any one of us. They could be hiding anywhere. If we aren’t careful, such a mysterious person could be a vampire or a ghost. That would be very bad. Contrary to popular belief, the smartest person in the world can never be someone we would think of at first. It can’t be the first person who comes to mind. Many of you might think of someone famous. That is a mistake. The smartest person in the world is almost always the last person you can think of, and even if you feel as if you’ve finally tracked them down, they are merely a clever ruse.
What’s known as a red herring if you will, is precisely what happens when you think you’ve tracked down the smartest person in the world. Each smart person is actually just another herring covering up someone much smarter than they are, and so on, forever. You see, the smartest person in the world is never someone you can meet. They are impossible to encounter in real life, all we ever see are their emissaries.
Like it or not, you and I are plain old bozos. We are not the smartest people in the world, because the smartest people are somewhere out there causing us to fall for so many tricks and tracks which make us believe in smartness at all, when in reality smartness itself was yet another clever ruse devised by the smartest people we’ve never imagined at all. Such people are wary of fame and fortune, they avoid the spotlight at all costs and divert people’s attention away from their covert research and activities through the usage of the advanced psychic powers of high intelligence. Not that you know anything about that! I don’t either. I’m just another plain old bozo.
Do you know who the smartest person in the world is? If you ask me, I think they’re an ancient myth. Every time we think we’ve finally found them, we read their books and listen to their lectures only to uncover years later the true nature of their fraudulent activities, at least insofar as they appeared to us and our failings. Each ruse cleverer than the last, each page turned less the previous page, until finally we encounter the realms of unopened books, unwritten words, confounding experiences unexisting.
Yes indeed! It certainly is mysterious, to think anyone so smart could exist at all. Not even I, the writer of this philosophical reflection, could be considered clever enough to imagine a simple ruse or a mere red herring, when in fact, I am barely capable of walking through my apartment without getting lost. I am hardly capable of eating lunch without getting tricked on the way there. I’m not any smarter than you are, and you’re barely smarter than me, and in truth, neither of us are half as smart as someone twice as smart might pretend to be. It’s all layers of illusions, it’s an illusion. Perhaps that’s all the smartest person in the world really is. Another optical illusion!
Next time you’re planning on seeking out smartness, you should watch out. You might suddenly find yourself looking in the mirror, and get jump scared by a grade-A bozo! Such a fool might profit greatly from pondering the wisdom of their foolish quest. Indeed! A wise person might profit just as greatly admitting their foolish nature! Who is the greater bozo? The wise man or the fool? Which is in the room with us now?